Day 132 - Second Semester - First Year

 After discussing with my supervisor, he made me realize I went astray from the initial market formation theory. He told me to forget about the conflict itself and instead focus on what exactly consumers did in both conflictual and non-conflictual situations. After doing that, I was to separate each tactic into categories and provide an explanation with examples for each classification. I did that and sent him what I had so far. 

I'm also still experimenting with minimalism. I have two boxes full of stuff at my front door that I plan to get rid of. Because we are in a lockdown, I'm not too sure what to do of them. I have mostly decluttered my book shelf - keeping only the books that have value (including sentimental). Much to my liking, I have very little stuff laying around and I'm quite proud of my minimalist kitchen (I actually have room to cook!). However, I still see some problem areas that I will have to inevitably address at some point:

1. My Clothes
While I did reduce the number of clothes I own I still have a full closets. From the top of my head I can say that I own at least 7 coats and jackets (including a lab coat?) and more sweaters than I can possibly wear. I did create some capsules for winter and summer clothes, but I think there is still lots of room for improvement. There are clothes that I don't really like but that I'm struggling to part with either because they are nice or because they were gifts. 

2. My Bathroom
I have these cubes that hold all of my bathroom essentials. However, my apartment being quite tiny, I'd love to find a more elegant way to organize my stuff so that the bathroom doesn't feel as crammed. Also, how many towels does one really need? I think I have at least a dozen which hardly makes sense. 

3. My Bed
I'm really in a love-hate relationship with my bed. Some days I just want to snuggle up all day - to the point of considering moving my TV to the bedroom. Other days the wooden frame, the dust under the bed and most importantly the (sweat?) stains on my mattress make me want to yeet the bed out of the window and get myself one of those Japanese Tatami Mats instead. So what's keeping me from doing that? Probably not wanting to look like a complete slob who sleeps on the floor. 

4. My Desk
Probably the most cluttered area because I still don't know what to do with my office supplies that I use regularly. I don't particularly want boxes on my table but I'm still looking for a solution to this problem. 

Back to work!

Day 128 - Second Semester - First Year

 I started my Ph.D. in marketing 128 day ago. I've completed by first semester and although I'm still waiting for my grades, my second semester has started.

As part of my program, I'm supposed to muster up a first year project which might be published if I'm lucky. I started off my general quest for an interesting phenomenon by stating to myself that I was interested in food marketing. This really was one of those spontaneous decisions that I made, and I'm starting to seriously pay the price for it. 

I remember during the first days of meeting my supervisor, he asked me "so what exactly interests you about food marketing?". I must quite shamefully admit that I had no answer to that question, which resulted in an awkward pause and a bullshit answer that I can't even remember. Despite that botched interview, I still got my acceptance letter and here I am dong a PhD in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. 

Over numerous meetings, I was able to somewhat narrow down my research interest to the interaction between two groups of people, vegans and anti-vegans. By anti-vegans I mean of course anyone that makes it their business to speak openly against vegans. What really piqued my interest is the simple question "why?". Why do these people care what vegans put in their mouth? Why bother generate the memes? In my struggle to understand whether hating on vegans was a hobby or an integral part of their personality (identity?) I was also presented with institutional theory (market formation). For some reason I latched on to that theory. Perhaps because it was presented in a well-written article that I didn't find too boring or because I just paid more attention to it during my marketing strategy course. Regardless of the reason, I now had to combine institutional theory with the concept of conflicts between consumer groups. 

My supervisor provided me with a couple articles about consumer-driven market formation. I was able to classify them into two broad categories: Conflictual Market Formation and Non-conflictual Market Formation. While both groups referred to conflicts in the market between groups of consumers, none of the articles actually defined the term conflict. Every single paper referred to an ideological disagreement as conflict. However, merely identifying a disparity between the beliefs of two groups does not necessarily point to a conflict. Typically, a conflict between two groups will have some belief that propels the group into a conflict: (1) superiority, (2) injustice, (3) vulnerability, (4) distrust, (5) helplessness (Eidelson and Eidelson, 2003). From the articles my supervisors gave me which included conflict, two of them dealt with the fashion industry (Dolbec and Fischer, 2015; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2013), one was about organic farming (Martin and Schouten, 2014) and I took the liberty of adding another about music piracy (Geisler, 2008 and 2012). The premise of all the articles is the same: conflict in the market has lead to the creation or the expansion of a market. While the fashion and music articles were clear cases of injustice (illegal music downloads and amateur fashion reporters) and vulnerability (fatshionistas), the organic farming article only vaguely mentioned the possibility of the conflict stemming from superiority.

Referring this back to my projects on vegans, I quickly came to the conclusion that I have no idea what phase this conflict is in. However, because of the nature of the vegan ideology, I believe there are multiple levels of conflicts that exist. Each level has the potential to cause conflicts not only between groups of consumers, but also between consumers and producers. Theoretically, I would find it interesting to identify the specific beliefs that propel conflicts with vegans and various consumer groups. Then, I would link observable actions to those beliefs which would allow me to maybe link the vegan conflict to a specific phase (shock, drama, crisis, reconstitution, institutionalization, maintenance) and finally, I would like to examine how all of these actions bundled together affect the existing (growing?) market for vegan food. Practically, I have no idea how to do this.